AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Elspeth Reeve

June 20, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
FBI director Robert Mueller said the government has used surveillance drones in the U.S. — though "in a very, very minimal way, very seldom" — at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "It's very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident when you need the capability," Mueller said before...

June 14, 2013
Syria is being compared to a lot of things — Kosovo, Rwanda, Libya, Iraq — and the Obama administration is divided over which lessons should apply. Here's what President Obama will do for Syrian rebels: give them small arms and ammunition. Here's what he's considering: a no-fly zone along the...

June 13, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The metadata that the National Security Agency collects on all calls in the U.S. is not just what's on a phone bill, as the program's supporters have claimed. Your phone bill lists some of the same things the NSA's collecting — numbers dialed, length of all — but does not...

June 13, 2013
Michael Morrell is retiring as deputy director of the CIA, and will be replaced by Avril Haines, the first woman to hold that job. Morrell spent 33 years at the CIA, and has served as acting CIA director twice, but says he wants to spend more time with his family....

June 12, 2013
Senate Armed Services Committee chair Carl Levin has killed a proposal that would have taken away military commanders' control in deciding whether to prosecute sexual assault cases and given it to an independent prosecutor. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand championed the reform as a way to increase reporting and prosecution of sexual...

June 7, 2013
Mitt Romney has had seven months to think about why he lost the 2012 election, and now that he's coming out of his post-campaign dark period, you'd think he'd know exactly how to answer reporters' questions about what happened. But in a new interview with CNN's Gloria Borger, Romney showed...

June 5, 2013
Another Romneyesque figure has been spotted in President Obama's administration. Michael Froman, nominated to be the U.S. trade representative, has about $500,000 in a Cayman Islands account, The New York Times' Jonathan Weisman reports. Froman, a former investment manager at Citigroup, also benefitted from the "carried interest" loophole that helped...

June 4, 2013
The College National Republican Committee goes where the Republican National Committee wouldn't dare in its 2012 election autopsy -- they admit that it's not just the party's positions on gay marriage and abortion that repel young voters. It's the economic policy, too. The most eye-catching part of the College Republicans'...

May 29, 2013
House Oversight Committee chair Darrell Issa has made up his mind about what happened within the Obama administration as it crafted talking points about Benghazi last September. He just can't quite prove it. So on Tuesday, Issa subpoenaed all the Benghazi talking points-related emails from 10 State Department aides, because...

May 23, 2013
President Obama rejected the Bush-era term Global War on Terrorism in a major speech justifying and announcing changes to his counterterrorism policies at the National Defense University on Thursday. "Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless 'global war on terror' — but rather as a series...